Crux

44 PHUKET

Saturday October 27th

Sam tended her wounds as best she could. The bullet had gone clean through her tricep, missing the bone and tendons. Her engineered clotting factors had cut off the bleeding almost immediately. Regen genes were already knitting the long fibers of her muscle back together.

If Jake had had those advantages… If the technology wasn’t locked up for soldiers and spies…

Sam swallowed the bitterness, washed out the wound, gritted her teeth at the pain, then filled it full of antibiotic cream and bandaged it shut. The other cuts had closed themselves but still needed disinfecting. More washing, more antibiotic cream, more bandages. In a few days she’d look as good as new.

She washed off the last of the dust and blood, pulled on fresh clothes, packed the gun, knives, clothes, cash, and fake ID. Then she was ready.

On the way out she stopped by Jake’s body, knelt down and brushed his face with her fingers. She wished she could do something for him, bury him, treat him with the tenderness he deserved. But the needs of the living trumped the needs of the dead.

She did the best she could with little time. She dragged his body to the greenhouse, cycled the simple airlock, pulled him inside and laid him flat. The plants and the rich earth and the warm, humid, CO2-laden air smelled of life to her. She’d leave him here, the most peaceful place she knew. The CO2 levels fed the plants and killed insects, and the airlock would keep scavengers out. He’d at least be spared some indignities.

A tear made its way down her face, a sob threatened to emerge, and she knew that it was now or never, that she’d be paralyzed if she stayed here even a moment longer. Go. She had to go.

A trucker stopped for her on the highway, gave her a ride as far north as Thung Song through agonizingly slow traffic. At a truck stop she tried for two hours to find a ride further on. When it became clear there was none, she found an old motorbike, far from the lights and cameras. Sam sat on the bike, used her hands to break off the panel that hid the ignition wiring, and hotwired it like the ERD had taught her to. Then she was off, into the night.

It was just after midnight when she crossed the mainland bridge into Phuket. She abandoned the bike on the side of the road, took a cheap room in the seedier part of town, showered and changed into the dark pants and dark sleeveless blouse she’d purchased here, months ago. She replaced the bandage with a triple layer of wide black vinyl tape around her tricep, then applied more concealer to the cuts, abrasions, and bruises on her body. She stuffed cash, phone, and fake ID into her pockets. Finally, she pulled on the four-inch spiked and LED-studded heels she’d acquired here, months ago.

She left the gun and knives in the room. They’d search her before letting her in to see Lo Prang. An obvious weapon could blow her chances.

And she herself was weapon enough.

Phuket was the ultimate beach town by day, the ultimate vice town by night. Like a cross between Miami and Las Vegas, it offered all the pleasures of water and sun twelve hours of the day, and all the pleasures of gambling, drugs, and sex at any hour, day or night.

Lo Prang’s House of Pleasure was at the end of a long strip of bars, nightclubs, and brothels where Chinese, American, and European tourists gathered to spend their money on drinks and drugs and the willing flesh of the thousands of girls that flocked here from the countryside.

She’d come here herself, almost six months ago, seeking funds. Lo Prang’s illegal muay Thai fights paid well. He paid extra for an attractive Western woman willing to fight. And she, with the bookies setting the odds steeply against her, borrowed heavily from a loan shark to bet on herself. Three fights later she’d been able to afford the new identity, the melanin therapy, the facial bone structure changes that allowed her to push on to Mae Dong.

Now she needed something else. Something that would cost her more.

There was a line outside the door an hour long. Deliberate scarcity created to enforce the twin illusions of exclusivity and popularity. She went around it, towering over the women and most of the men in the line with her spiked heels. The tiny LEDs her heels were crusted with pulsed with every step, flashing as she brought them down, sending patterns of light rippling up their length. Sam headed to the front of the line, where the bouncers with their oversized muscle-grafted bodies waited, scowling, in their dark suits.

She saw a look of recognition pass across one of their faces as she approached. The huge Asian man raised a finger to his ear and his lips parted as he spoke something, pitched low for a throat mic to hear. Their eyes locked, and she read those lips. Jade Tiger, they said, in Thai. Jade Tiger.

His eyes stayed locked on hers, and then he nodded to the voice in his earpiece, and pulled back the velvet rope for Sam to pass.

The club was built on a cliff, with views of the beach below and the Andaman Sea beyond that from every level. The entrance was on the uphill side of the club, on the top level. From there one could work their way down and down, to realms that were darker, where the services offered were less constrained by laws or moral norms.

Sam made her way into the club, then through the top floor, past the dance floor where the bar girls in their skimpy skintight dresses danced with Chinese and American men twice their age, tempting them to pay for the even greater pleasures that could be had in private. Past the bars where the tourists ordered rounds of shots and glowing or bubbling or smoking drinks. Past the hookah couches where the younger set reclined, and sucked on water pipes loaded with genetically potentiated hashish, or engineered blissweed with its enzymatically produced ecstasy, or perhaps just a tiny bit of discreetly sprinkled opium. Her heels tapped the floor, sending little pulses of light up them on every step.

She found the stairs down to the next level, walked down them. The grotesquely enhanced bouncers stiffened as she came near. She read the tension on their bodies, the wide eyes as they tracked her, and walked by them as if they weren’t there at all. The stairwell opened into a floor that was casino mixed with strip club. Men and a few women played at games of chance while nude and semi-nude Thai girls danced and writhed on stage, or pressed their bodies against the gamblers, stroking them discreetly beneath the tables, earning payment for their dances and caresses in chips, all while distracting the gamblers, tilting the odds ever more in favor of the house.

Sam caught flashes of Nexus as she crossed the floor. The zombified, addictive haze of the gamblers, laying down chip after chip, jonesing, dysphoric, craving that hit of pleasure that came with three cherries or a winning hand. The saccharine seduction oozing from the minds of the dancers, the semblance of arousal, the promises of sweet delights, for a price.

It all disgusted her.

She found the stairs across the oversexed casino, took them down to the third level, the flesh market. They stopped her at the portal. More oversized bouncers in dark suits. More big men, tense, amped up.

Were you there for my fight against Glao Bot? Sam wondered. Did you see what I did to that big man? Think you can do better?

It cost just to enter this floor, they told her. A thousand baht. She heard the tremor in their voices, but she paid it. They frisked her, professionally, carefully, thoroughly.

Does it relieve you that I don’t have a gun, or knife? she thought at them. Does that make you feel any better, when you’ve seen what I can do with my bare hands?

They nodded to Sam when they were done, opened the door to this final level of Lo Prang’s pleasure palace.

Sex buffeted her mind immediately. Overwhelmingly intimate sensations from men and women alike. Sam clenched her mind against it, pushed out the unwanted thoughts and feelings.

The floor was a maze of darkened alcoves with corridors threading between them. The alcoves had stages, live sex shows with men and women in every possible permutation of twos or threes or fours or more. Each step she took sent a minor flash of light out, illuminating people in the throes of depravity.

Things had changed in the months she’d been gone. Nexus was endemic here now. Every alcove and door offered delights to the senses and the flesh. Every one of them also offered additional delights for those using Nexus.

Audiences watched, used Nexus to tune in to the sensations they wanted to absorb. She passed offers to live out any fantasy she’d ever thought of here, and dozens more she hadn’t. She was given the option to ride any of these bodies, to put her mind in theirs, to steer the action if she paid the right price, to feel every single sensation that was happening on stage, from the point of view of either gender, without ever having to soil her own hands.

A sign let her know she could always tune in to ride a performer from anywhere in the world, if she liked.

Girls and boys approached her, offered themselves to her for her personal, physical use. Bargains at twice the price, they told her. They all came loaded with Nexus, so she could feel every bit of their pleasure as she had them, or experience their pain and humiliation in exquisite detail as she hurt or degraded them, if that was her kink. Sam thought of Sarai’s mother, of how that had scarred Sarai. She clenched her fists in anger and pushed through them.

Other alcoves offered her girls and boys ready to fall in love with her, to use Nexus to twist their own minds. No more tolerating pretend passion, here. Why not hire a whore that is truly attracted to you, aroused by you, insatiably hungry for your touch? Isn’t that what you really want?

Sam felt bile rising up inside her. This place embodied everything she hated about Nexus.

No, she corrected herself. Not Nexus. The people who use it this way.

It was a hard-won distinction, a hard-won realization, that technology could be used for good or bad, could be disgusting or sublime. She wouldn’t let the vileness of this place taint the beauty she felt when she touched the children’s minds.

The things happening in the alcoves became more and more unspeakable as she progressed. Perversions and debasements. Women – mostly women – doing things for money that no human being should be subjected to, voluntarily or not. Eager audience members tuning in to witness it, to relish it, from the standpoint of debased or debaser. Sam’s nausea rose and rose.

Then she was past the last of them, and into the curving hallway that led to Lo Prang.

The feel of sex and degradation left her mind as she rounded the corner. Lo Prang surely had another way to reach his inner sanctum, she realized. But this was the way he wanted his supplicants to come to him, walking through his domain, forced to experience it, to be aroused by it or disturbed by it. Either way, it set them off balance.

Sam held her head high. She had an agenda. Nothing else mattered.

The door was guarded by two more oversized Thai men in black suits. Muscle grafts and gene tweaks broadened their backs and shoulders to ridiculous proportions. Weapons bulged beneath their jackets. Earpieces were in their ears. Unlike the others, these two had minds she could feel. Hard shells of ruthlessly controlled Nexus emanations surrounded them both.

Their eyes crept over her body as she approached, her heels flashing with every step. They scanned her for weapons. No fear on these two. They were harder than the others, perhaps, or more ready for her.

Fools.

Sam stepped up to them, head unbowed.

“I want to talk to Lo Prang,” she said. “Tell him the Jade Tiger is back.”